This actually made me somewhat sad. I remember meeting people from other colleges in UP (College of Arts and Letters etc) who really dreaded taking Math 1 and Math2 , the basic math course of the University of the Philippines General Education program, then they instituted RGEP (forgot what this means) wherein students got to choose the basic or general education courses they took. I feel this is contributing to the lack of whole roundness of UP grads, and in a way is leading to a decline, We often hear “I’m just not good in math etc” but the reality is if we try hard enough we can overcome our fear of math and other subjects. The truth is that I find math hard , but I do not let that fear control me. RGEP was a way for people to evade, sometimes I fear for our future.
If only those people knew that many computer scientists feel the same way. We are in awe. At one level, we feel like this is way over our heads, too. How could these programmers done so much with so little? Wow. But then we take a breath and realize that we have the tools we need to dig in and understand how this stuff works. Having some training and experience, we can step back from our awe and approach the code in a different way. Like a scientist. And anyone can have the outlook of a scientist.
via Knowing and Doing: August 2009 Archives.